We are delighted to share with you a learning brief on coordinating and managing information during the COVID-19 pandemic developed by the Covid-19 Hygiene Hub in collaboration with the GWC, the Global Handwashing Partnership, The RCCE Collective, and the Hand Hygiene for All Initiative. 

This brief summarises lessons learned about coordination and information management during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this brief, we describe how existing coordination mechanisms adapted to the pandemic and how new mechanisms arose to meet new needs. We also describe patterns in coordination and information management across all phases of the programme cycle. We provide practical recommendations to guide coordination and information management in the short term, in response to COVID-19, and ideas for how coordination and information management could be strengthened to support future outbreak responses. The lessons shared in this brief are drawn from the work of the COVID-19 Hygiene Hub. These insights emerged from:

• 79 interviews with COVID-19 response organisations including a subset of interviews with stakeholders involved in leading or co-leading national humanitarian water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) coordination platforms.

• Hundreds of informal conversations with programme implementers across 65 countries between April 2020 and September 2021.

• More than 50 in-depth technical support initiatives, many of which were done in partnership with key coordination mechanisms such as the Global WASH Cluster, the Hand Hygiene For All Global Initiative and the Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) Collective Service

This brief is primarily designed for people engaged in coordination platforms within the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector. It is also relevant to other programmers, researchers, policy makers and funders who have been involved in COVID-19 prevention programming. In this brief we refer to this group of people and organisations as response actors.

In 2020, the GWC responded to the Covid-19 infodemic by providing a knowledge management platform with over 500 resources including a global library for Covid-19 & WASH guidance as well as a country library for national coordination platforms. Given the recent decrease in the resources produced as well as the infodemic created initially by the Covid-19 pandemic, the GWC will also decrease its involvement in Covid-19 knowledge management. Note that the repositories above will be updated until the end of 2021, beyond that, the libraries will remain as an archive and will be further integrated into our resource center. We nevertheless always welcome receiving examples of COVID-19 / WASH resource guidance documents, training initiatives, webinars generated by your partner organisation to be added to GWC website or in the next newsletter, please contact globalwashcluster@gmail.com.

The GWC would like to encourage WASH partners and coordination platforms to use the above learning brief at country levels, to discuss the lessons learned and recommendations in order to inform the coordination of future outbreak responses. We also encourage national coordinators to share this widely with their partners.

Best regards,